As equipment gets more complex, plant teams are ...azimadli.com/downloads/PUBLISHED_ARTICLES/Plant...to integrate with Honeywell’s Experion® PKS reduces design and operator errors

30 JULY 2015 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

Your machines are talking to you. Do you always under-stand what they are saying? Who outside your plant would you allow to listen in and help translate?

Remote condition monitoring (CM) technologies enable e� ective, e� cient predictive maintenance (PdM), and some of the most e� ective PdM programs draw these CM data from a wide variety of assets into the cloud for analysis. � ese programs can help drive real-time visibility into machine performance at both the asset level and at a higher, plantwide level. However, as systems and machines get increasingly complex, the skill sets required to understand machine performance data also increase in complexity, and gaps can easily emerge between the volume of available machine data and the number of skilled plant workers who have the time and ability to understand and act on it.

OEMs are starting to address this gap by o� ering remote monitoring services for a wider range of plant assets than they have traditionally concerned themselves with. O� en, they’re partnering with analytics � rms to provide maintenance teams with information about the health of their assets.

“OEM-enabled condition monitoring is in its infancy,” says Burt Hurlock, CEO of Azima DLI (www.azimadli.com). “It’s far too early to predict how it will disrupt or change the roles and responsibilities of plant personnel in the long run, but we can already see patterns emerging. Much depends on the OEM’s strategic ambitions – it’s the di� erence between staying in the capital equipment business and expanding into information and diagnostic services, which requires a full complement of new skills and capabilities.”

Much also depends on plants’ willingness to share their data or at least to invest in maintenance as a service (MaaS) o� er-ings. In Plant Services’ 2014 survey on PdM implementation, only 15% of respondents said that they shared data from their PdM systems more than once per quarter with third parties via remote monitoring technologies, and 71% said they had no plans ever to share these data with an OEM supplier (Figure 1). Furthermore, although 20% of respondents indicated that they were using some form of embedded PdM intelligence from equipment suppliers, more than double that share said they had no plans to deploy this sort of technology (45%).

As equipment gets more complex, plant teams are increasingly turning to OEMs and their analytics partners

to understand and manage machine performance

The Plant Services 2015 Disruptive Technology series is a quarterly look at technology innovations that are generating rapid changes in how plant managers and engineers approach their jobs. The series continues this month by investigat-ing ways that OEM-enabled condition monitoring is starting to impact wider machinery health programs, and the ways

these remote monitoring programs are changing the relationship between OEMs and plant maintenance and reliability teams.

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DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES / OEM-ENABLED CONDITION MONITORING

Plants soon may not have much of a choice in whether to move in this direction, as OEMs expand into remote monitoring and diagnostics (RM&D) as a practical necessity. For OEMs, it’s a matter of either helping fill voids of expertise at the plant level, or risking a signifi-cant break in business continuity.

Chet Namboodri, global lead for the manufacturing in-dustry at Cisco (www.cisco.com), describes this new facet of the OEM/end-user relationship: “No doubt there’s a return on investment (ROI) for OEMs who invest in RM&D/MaaS capabilities, along with the ROI for end users, who really no longer have the expertise to work the maintenance and reli-ability of more and more complex equipment.”

For this story, the third in our disruptive technology series, Plant Services asked several industry profession-als: How quickly are OEMs and plant managers redraw-ing their traditional business boundaries in order to take advantage of these condition monitoring trends? What options do plants have to engage with OEMs and their partners?

MOVING BEYOND HEAVY INDUSTRYTo get a handle on where OEM-based condition monitor-ing is going, it helps to know where it has been. Glenn Gardner, business development manager for Fluke (www.fluke.com), suggests that this current trend has its roots in the Internet of Things (IoT) movement.

“What’s great is that in the industrial space, something resembling IoT has actually been happening for more than a decade now,” says Gardner. “The OEMs of much larger equipment – for example the main turbine at a power plant or the main compressor at a refinery – those OEMs have been setting up what they call a contractual services agree-ment (or CSA) for maintenance and repair on those assets over their typical lifetime. A lot of the times, when they set up that CSA, they’re also collecting real-time data and streaming that data to some type of centralized monitoring hub, where they have a lot of expertise on the design and operation of that particular asset type.”

This approach took hold first primarily in the heavier industries, like power generation, oil and gas, and mining,

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM JULY 2015 31


and it was applied speci� cally to the highest-value assets, such as turbines, compressors, and incinerators.

For example, explains Gardner, “A main turbine OEM could be able to stream data via the Internet about its main turbines to their own head-quarters and then know what their entire � eet of products is doing. � at’s typically a part of that CSA, and that’s been a pretty standard practice for the really expensive high-end equipment. If you’re a big plant, you only have one of those assets, so it’s tough to develop a whole lot of expertise in it, unless you want to be an OEM, which means you have exposure to hundreds of thou-sands of those assets rather than the one when you’re a power plant.”

“One of the spaces where we saw technology’s infancy was in the oil and gas industry because of remote platforms,” says Bart Winters, business manager for asset management solutions at Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywellprocess.com). “� at’s where we initially saw early adopters in that space to be able to bring in expertise from onshore locations, and to be able to help troubleshoot problems remotely on the platform. Now, we’re seeing that migrate to other applications where the sites might be remote. We’re seeing that in Canada with the projects that we’re doing up in the oil sands, those types of applications where you don’t have as many resources.”

“With larger pieces of equipment, manufacturers are selling perfor-mance contracts rather than the equipment,” adds John Renick, direc-tor of partner solutions for Meridium (www.meridium.com). “Condition monitoring is the best way to deliver on those types of contracts and to get the best ROI from them.”

� ese days, OEMs are facing strategic choices that may have very long-term implications for the health of their businesses.

“� e choice OEMs make between defensive and expansive strategies will be driven by how they invest in moni-

toring capabilities,” says Azima DLI’s Hurlock. “Some OEMs will develop and have developed proprietary tech-nologies that tend to be especially well-suited to monitoring the machines the OEMs make, and perhaps not as well suited to monitoring other machines in the balance of the plant. Other OEMs may adopt third-party solutions that are proven on both OEM sourced machines as well as other balance-of-plant assets. � e latter will soon � nd themselves advising plant sta� on optimizing plantwide asset health, their own line of machines included.”

Honeywell’s Winters agrees that the strategy will depend on the OEM’s business model. “OEMs that we see – and these are common in mining and process industries – have more of a services-based model where they’re doing ‘power by the hour’ or perfor-mance guarantees and have a much higher motivation to be able to keep the equipment running. Others that are just focused on selling equipment, selling spares – they have less of an interest and there’s less of an incentive to monitor and keep the equipment running because they want to be sell-ing the spares.”

“� ere’s more to come over the next few years regarding MaaS,” adds Nam-boodri, “as there is ample opportunity in this space.”

BENEFITS FOR PLANT MAINTENANCEAzima DLI’s Hurlock suggests that plants will bene� t as greater numbers of OEMs commit to o� ering remote condi-tion monitoring programs and services.

“When OEMs set out to achieve two simple goals, which are (1) eliminating unplanned maintenance, and (2) elim-inating unplanned capital spending, a range of knock-on e� ects follow,” Hurlock says. “� e � rst and perhaps most easily measured short-term impact is on costs – the cost of inven-tory, contractors, employee overtime, spoilage, and the opportunity cost of lost production time are all costs that plants can reduce by eliminating unplanned events. � ese are easily tracked, measured and rewarded.”

Avoiding unplanned capital spend-ing also gives planners the time to source and negotiate prices for major asset replacements, adds Hurlock.

Fluke’s Gardner also sees a con-nection between the OEM’s machine knowledge and the plant manager’s

32 JULY 2015 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM


Figure 1. A 2014 Plant Services survey found that PdM data is being analyzed around once a week by in-house maintenance, operations, and reliability engineers and is not commonly made available to OEM suppliers or other third parties.

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uptime goals. Because OEMs own the asset’s design, he says, “They have just a bit more intimacy as to why an asset behaves the way that it does.” And if OEMs have performance contracts with users, he adds, “They’ve also got access to a larger pool of assets and therefore have some sort of baseline to compare aberrant behavior to.”

“Progressive OEMs see the forest from their specific tree,” says Greg Ziegler, business development man-ager for online systems at SKF (www.skf.com). “What the customer really wants is an overall view of reliability of their equipment at their facility, while continually improving the asset reliability and efficiency.”

“If you’re talking to maintenance and operations, they’re very interested in what can you do for me today,” says Winters. “What’s the top-priority problem that I have today with my data? I think when the benchmark-ing comes in, is it’s more around plant design and reliability, the reliabil-ity, availability and maintainability (RAM) studies that you do up front, or what equipment should I be selecting, what’s the most reliable?”

Cisco’s Namboodri says that tangible business benefits are within reach for plant teams that deploy remote monitoring and diagnostics solutions architected for manufactur-ing plants to enhance performance of their machines. “Depending on the OEM, this takes on more-advanced predictive maintenance capabilities tied to condition monitoring and/or management by exception with alarms and events to trigger work flows (with collaboration) adminis-tered remotely,” he says. For example:• Harley-Davidson’s York Manufac-

turing Facility reduced model new product introduction (NPI) from more than a year to 1.5 weeks while increasing OEE by 7%-12%.

• Comau, a supplier and partner for most global automakers, reduced machine lifecycle end-user TCO by 30% by leveraging secure remote ac-cess, diagnostics, and maintenance.“These were achieved as a result of

remote monitoring and collabora-tion, where SMEs are beamed in to troubleshoot and accelerate time to repair (TTR) and NPI ramp-up with-out the delays and costs of travel,” says Namboodri.

“The toughest thing, if you think it through – you’re one plant,” says Fluke’s Gardner. “You only have a certain number of machines on your plant floor, and by definition, can only have a certain amount of experi-ence as to what the flaws look like when they show up. If you are able to share the data that you collect from third parties, you might find a con-



sultant who spent a lot of time work-ing on this specific model of machine. Likewise, the OEM has design basis information, and they can help you understand what the problem might be. You’ve got a lifeline. You’ve got somebody else that you can talk to that has a certain level of expertise.”

“What’s interesting to me is some of the customers aren’t familiar with these technologies like we’re using today and even with Lync to be able to remote in and actually converse with a person,” says Winters. “Honeywell of-fers with our Experion control system what we call a Collaboration Station, which now allows remote access from somebody at a remote location to actu-ally see what the operator is seeing on the control room displays.”

Hurlock adds that collected CM data “is easily replicated to Azima DLI-hosted databases to which Azima DLI analysts, who may be located anywhere in the world, have exclusive access.” Analysts then can make diagnostic results and recom-mendations available via a Web portal, he says.

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?When plant teams engage with OEMs for condition monitoring services, what types of approaches and technologies are being considered?

“It’s a variety,” says Mike Bou-dreaux, director of remote asset monitoring and analytics for Em-erson Process Management (www.emersonprocess.com). “We have some customers who are using Emerson’s remote monitoring services when-ever they first are introducing a new technology or a new way of working in their operation. Maybe it’s a new facility, or they’re just getting started in condition-based monitoring and maintenance and they don’t have the expertise in-house. We provide a monitoring service where we also coach someone locally so they can come up to speed and learn from the services that we’re providing.”

“Fluke is vendor agnostic when it comes to OEM equipment,” says Gard-ner, “and Fluke Connect is our first software as a service (SaaS) offering. It provides the ability for the end user to enter the type of equipment they’re tak-ing measurements against; store mea-surements of vibration, temperature, thermography against that machine;

and then compare it to other similar machines inside of their fleet.”

In general, says Honeywell’s Winters, “We’re seeing the addition of what I would call the sensing technology by the addition of sensors as well as the use of algorithms to be able to moni-tor that data coming in. The challenge with adding sensors is, what do you do

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with that data? You’re able to have smarter algorithms do the advanced analytics to be able to monitor that data.”

“For Azima DLI, vibration is especially well-suited to OEM or other third-party-enabled condition monitoring,” says Hurlock. “Entry level technicians are easily trained to take consistent, high-quality data using fault tolerant products, processes, and software. Azima DLI analysts are assisted by a proprietary software program called Exper-tALERT that screens vibration data on arrival and brings detected faults to the immediate attention of an experienced professional for review. Other technologies like thermogra-phy and oil analysis may eventually lend themselves to simi-larly large-scale collection and analysis, but the technology for doing so does not exist today.”

“I suppose it depends on the equipment and physical makeup,” says Namboodri. “With rotary equipment, for example, GE acquired some pretty sophisticated CM tech-nology in Bentley-Nevada that is readily used by OEMs to provide in-situ condition monitoring and services.”

“The struggles many of our customers or OEM’s custom-ers have is that the expertise is not available where or when they need it,” says Ziegler. “Today, remote services like SKF’s Machinery Health Reporting Program are perhaps evolu-tionary, as we have been supporting customers via phone, fax, email, or remote link for years. What is revolutionary is that we are now thinking in ways to deliver these services through next-generation products that are in development.”

T.J. Garten, electrical subject matter expert for Allied Reliability Group (www.alliedreliabilitygroup.com), says, “The value of installing at the OEM level is gained around space usage, ease of field-collection deployment, reduced field personnel access risk potentials, and potential integra-tion into PLC and remote monitoring systems.” He specifies

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Figure 2. Connected factory solutions enable OEM machine builders to more easily integrate with appropriate security and provisioning in order to monitor and enhance performance of their machines with services over the lifecycle of the equipment.

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that motor current signature analysis (MCSA) can be embedded into OEM machinery for monitoring of circuits that include VFDs to enable early identi� cation of power quality issues, VFD internal part failures, motor-related failures (such as rotor bar and winding shorts), and powertrain and operational variances. Garten adds that power quality monitoring systems have been used in OEM machinery such as chillers and compressors to monitor and detect conditions that will result in correlative component and part damage locally and in power distribution upstream systems.

“For the machine categories, I would point to reciprocating compressors,” says Fluke’s Gardner. “� ose are par-ticularly thorny beasts. � ere are a lot of service contracts on reciprocating compressors, speci� cally because they require a higher level of expertise com-pared to, say, a centrifugal pump.”

Brian Blum, CTS optimization mar-keting for Atlas Copco (www.atlascop-co.us), says ,“Knowing exactly how the (compressed air) system is performing makes identifying improvements much easier, giving the plant teams insights that before needed a system audit to pinpoint. Daily walks to the compres-sor room to check running hours and controller information are no longer needed since the information from the machine is sent to the customer’s PC. PMs can be accurately tracked, which could lead to reduced visits if previous-ly on a reactive or varying schedule.”

PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERSOne concern occasionally raised by OEMs is discomfort with the pos-sibility of having their machine data benchmarked against other vendors’ machines.

To Azima DLI’s Hurlock, this concern will be short-lived. “Machine health monitoring is becoming ever more cost-e� cient and e� ective,” he says. “All but the smallest, least critical assets in a plant are bound to be moni-tored whether OEMs make the com-

mitment to do so or not. � e only way OEMs can realistically expect data about their machines to remain siloed is by preempting third parties, includ-ing their customer, from performing the monitoring themselves.”

“I absolutely see where this is a con-cern for customers,” says Atlas Copco’s Blum. “I approach them with the expla-

nation that the bene� t of being able to utilize this data outweighs the concern that it is being used to track company performance. While this has been a question for some OEMs, it has not led to many customers not approving a re-mote monitoring program installation.”

“Manufacturers need to move beyond this concern to leverage the

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power of non-siloed data sources,” argues Meridium’s Renick. “� ere is tremendous value in larger sets of (anonymized) data that helps organi-zations understand the reliability of their assets on a plant basis, on a site with multiple plants, on an enterprise or global scale, and against global industry averages.”

“� ere’s enough performance infor-mation that is gathered via customer user groups and even less formal B2B social avenues that I would say that benchmarking data is readily available now to just about any user,” adds Cis-co’s Namboordi. “It’s a buyers’ market, and I don’t believe there’s much room these days for arbitrage by the OEM or

their third-party brokers.”� ere’s also the question of the

relationship between the OEMs and a third-party services o� ering, where the third party takes an active role to both co-exist and collaborate with the OEM and deliver new value to plants.

“We see more and more the trend where companies do not have the vibration expertise, or they might not have the IT expertise in-house,” says Ziegler. “In either case we can host the data (and/or perform the analysis) or the plant vibration analysis expert logs on our server, and can manage the data if the customer chooses.”

“One of the things that Honeywell provides that the OEMs don’t necessari-ly provide is what I would call ‘cross-� eet monitoring’ across various assets,” says Winters. “I see many cases in the process industry where there’s a mixed � eet of compressors and gas turbines, and that’s where an OEM solution doesn’t neces-sarily always � t, so you need a technol-ogy component that will apply to all of the various equipment types that you’re employing. What we provide is the base level of access to the information for customers to be able to make decisions and do the base level monitoring that they need. � ey can contact the OEM if there’s a problem that they can’t trouble-shoot or diagnose.”

“What’s happening now is you’re able to do that on less and less expensive equipment,” says Gardner. “It used to be that the economic value was only there for the extraordinarily high-end equipment. When you can share rich data rather than just a verbal descrip-tion of what’s happening, that’s a pretty big deal. It takes a lot of friction out of the process of getting experts to get their eyes on the data of the machine.”

Adds Namboordi: “I’d be concerned if I were working for an OEM who was not looking to make their machines Internet-ready for easier integration and upside revenue opportunities through proactive services post-sales over the lifecycle of the machine! � ey will be le� behind.”

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As equipment gets more complex, plant teams are ...azimadli.com/downloads/PUBLISHED_ARTICLES/Plant...to integrate with Honeywell’s Experion® PKS reduces design and operator errors